192	Oliver Cromwell	[1647-1648]
accusers with blunt defiance. " If any man say that we seek ourselves in doing this, much good may it do him with his thoughts. It shall not put me out of my way/' At other times he referred to these slanders with a patient confidence that justice would be done to him in the end. " Though it may be," he wrote in September, 1647, " for the present a cloud may lie over our actions to those not acquainted with the grounds of them; yet we doubt not but God will clear our integrity from any other ends we aim at but His glory and the public good/' Neither loss of popularity, misrepresentations, nor undeserved mistrust could diminish Cromwell's zeal for the cause. " I find this only good/' he wrote on his recovery from a dangerous illness in the spring of 1648: "to love the Lord and His poor despised people, to do for them, and to be ready to suffer with them, and he that is found worthy of this hath obtained great favour from the Lord/'
Not Cromwell's utterances only but his acts testify to the integrity of his motives. In March, 1648, Parliament settled an estate upon him as a reward for his services, to which he responded by offering to contribute a thousand a year, out of the seventeen hundred it brought in, to be employed in the recovery of Ireland. And so little did he dream of ever becoming himself the ruler of England, that at the very moment when fortune had opened the widest field to ambition, he began negotiations for the marriage of his eldest son to the daughter of a private gentleman of no great influence or position.